


One Screwed Up Family

by aparticularbandit



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: F/F, Soulmate AU, and this is mostly a rough draft, but one-shot, idk if the ideas work as well as i want them to, this is exploratory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 09:58:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16637774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aparticularbandit/pseuds/aparticularbandit
Summary: In which Rose's soulmate timer sucks.





	One Screwed Up Family

Her timer restarted the moment she first met Emilio Solano.

Rose didn’t notice the ticking clock blasted into her wrist like a shifting scar until she was in the shower the next morning, the numbers a very firm **33:18:07:--** , the seconds and milliseconds a blur, a visual hum between the freckles staining her skin with the lives she had already stolen.  She froze beneath the steaming spray, watching the minutes click past as the heat ran out, the water meeting the chill running beneath her skin.

It didn’t change anything.

She’d seen Emilio’s wrist as they stood chatting, his suit sleeve brushing back just enough as he lifted his wine glass for her to catch it, the blank **–:--:--:--:--** that Elena had described etched into his skin.  Timers flashed a bright white when they hit zero across the board, leaving the numbers for up to twenty-four hours before blanking out.  Rose knew; she’d lived it.  Emilio’s blank meant he wasn’t looking for a soulmate when his fingers brushed through her red hair, tucking strands behind her ear, and her own blank should have indicated the same thing.

But her timer was a traitor.

* * *

 

Clara’s lack of faith in the very idea of soulmates started young.

Her parents had been all too happily married, one soulmate to another, and more in love than anyone she’d met before or since.  She’d spent years as she grew up listening to fairy tales of princes and princesses, ignoring the warnings of other timers and focusing instead purely on those stories of romance and her own imagination, the steady tick-tick-ticking that said she would meet whomever it was when she was nine years old.  She’d counted down the time almost as eagerly as she believed the timer itself did, making sure to wear an outfit that was all _her_ the day the timer was meant to hit zero.

By then, her mother was dead and gone, her father slowly recovering from an alcohol-induced haze, and Clara herself nothing more than a little spitfire pickpocket, stealing from farmers and all but living by the riverbank.  A soulmate, she hoped, would help with all of this.  They would, at the very least, be somewhere she could hide in the winter.

Her father brought Elena di Nola home to meet her daughter, and through the mud and grime, Clara saw her timer flash a bright searing white into her skin.  Elena noticed when Clara’s father did not, a smile curving the edge of her thin lips as Clara’s eyes sought out the blank on the wrist of the woman who would soon become her stepmother.

Clara stopped believing in the timer’s validity then.

* * *

 

Rose took to wearing long sleeves, despite the Miami heat, to hide her timer’s renewed ticking.  The timer didn’t come with any true sound, but she could almost feel the beat echoing in time with the unsteady beat of her heart.  The sleeves were just as much for her comfort as for Emilio’s ignorance; she didn’t want to see it just as much as she wanted to hide it from him.

It was to her great fortune that her prey was too distracted by his two children to pursue her as physically as he had with his previous wives.  Emilio admitted as much to her when her timer hit **03:00:15:--** , when he walked her back to her apartment after their third date, head bent to watch the water running in rivulets through the cobblestones as he continued to hold his ebony umbrella over both of their heads.  Rose lied when she assured him there was nothing wrong with a longer chase – lied not because she didn’t prefer the extra time but out of a concern that this longer wait would draw him away from her clutches.  Worse still, the mention of family returning from what felt like all edges of the globe – mental and physical – and she kissed him before he left, one hand brushing along the smooth skin of his bald head to insure an invitation to meet his family in four days’ time.

If she was incredibly lucky, the white would fade enough by then that it wouldn’t be a distraction, and she could have a blank of her own to wear as proudly as Emilio hid his own.

* * *

 

Any remaining semblance of belief in the precious idea of _soulmates_ was lost when her baby brother was born.

Elena’s stomach swelled to her father’s immense joy, and he’d called her over to press her hand against her stepmother’s bare belly.  At every opportunity, she’d refused his request, but when Elena asked with the dark sparkle in her even darker eyes, Clara hadn’t the heart to refuse.  _This_ was the woman for which her timer halted, this creature who showed her no love in return and whose own soulmate seemed to have disappeared long ago.

Clara never asked Elena about _her_ timer.  She hadn’t wanted to know, hadn’t wanted to feign interest in the woman who refused to let her play by the river any longer, who shaved her head when she couldn’t brush the tangles out, whose motherly kiss to her bare head made her squirm in discomfort.  Sometimes she escaped while the woman slept, dangled her bare feet in the river like she used to do before they’d ever met, and pick at the dashes embedded in her left wrist, as if that would make the timer start back up again.

She wanted it to have been a simple glitch.

It wasn’t a glitch.

When Derek was born, the little baby boy with the brown hair like but darker than her stepmother’s and the rosy cheeks, Elena had kept Clara far from him.  There were weeks after he was born where Clara never saw hide nor hair of him, and despite her father’s insistence that she meet her baby brother, Elena refused.

One day, Clara came home from school earlier than normal – she’d skipped class because she’d beaten up another group of kids for teasing her again and the teachers didn’t want her around – and she walked in on what appeared to be an empty house.  She scurried into Derek’s room because she knew her stepmother hadn’t wanted her to and finally lay her bright blue eyes on her brother’s dark brown ones.

Clara knew the bright white flash of the numbers etched into Derek’s wrist, knew exactly what they meant, and her lips pressed into a thin line before she reached down, brushing his dark curls out of his face.

“We’re one fucked up family, aren’t we?” she asked in her child’s voice, knowing her stepmother was behind her.

Elena didn’t answer, just grabbed Clara roughly by her shoulders and pushed her out of her brother’s room.

* * *

 

Rose ignored her timer as much as she could.  She’d lived her life this way, refusing to believe in the romantic overtures that her classmates had.  Some had the audacity to ask when hers went off, and when she refused to answer, they believed it must have happened in a crowd, or that something even more tragic must have happened.  It was more fun to listen to their ideas than it was to hint at the truth, but her expressions led them to believe that she was _born_ blank, a lie she would have far preferred to the truth.  But out of all this came good news: bars, pubs, restaurants dedicated to _people like her_ , who still wanted the warmth of a body next to theirs or an attempt at a relationship that society would always see as less fulfilling than those of people with their soulmates.  It was at one of these places that she had met Emilio, an upper-class sort for those who had the money to afford it.

This time, Rose chose a girl bar that she’d frequented upon first arriving to Miami.  Her dress was meant to accentuate everything about her _other_ than her timer, which was tucked beneath one of its long sleeves.  She hoped it would go off as it had before, with someone who was already blank and would not pursue her, and further hoped that the fabric would hide the flash of white light.

Emilio was supposed to be with his family, welcoming his son back from a cross-Atlantic flight with the help of a daughter struggling to remain sober.  It was possible this was all a lie.  But his hands on her hips as she’d kissed him on her doorstep indicated otherwise.

But the timer didn’t go off as she entered the bar, eyes flicking from person to person to try and speed up the process, and it didn’t go off as she sat next to the woman at the bar, the beautiful one who would not let her buy her a drink, and it didn’t go off before the two of them left the bar together, her right hand resting on the small of the other woman’s back.

By then, she’d forgotten about it, too caught up in her conversation with the woman whose name, she’d learned, was Luisa.

* * *

 

For her part, Luisa’s timer had gone off twice.

Once, when she was six years old, in one of her father’s dark cars as he drove her back from school.  Her hazel eyes had caught the white flash, the **00:00:00:00:00** in her skin, and she’d looked outside the windows, trying to see if she could make out any of the people they were passing by.  But she was small, her hands clutching the car door, and within a few seconds, the timer had restarted again, number speeding away.  She didn’t even mention it to her father, although she thought about it, briefly, as they entered his hotel.  It must have been a glitch.

(When they got inside the hotel, they got the call.  She didn’t see the body.  _There wasn’t a body to be seen at all._ )

Once, shortly afterwards, when a babysitter didn’t know how to deal with her grief and gave her a bottle of water that _did not_ taste like water.  She’d been much more aware of the flash then, and it seemed to blind her.  For years afterwards, she wondered if the babysitter was her soulmate, but when she was older, she realized that, no, that was a false hope.

(She was an alcoholic.  She was _destined_ to be an alcoholic.  _Her soulmate_ was _alcohol._ )

Her timer restarted her first time through rehab, and she thought, maybe, the universe decided to give her a third chance.  A _better_ chance.  She’d gone to the girl bar because she wanted her soulmate to be an actual real live person, and she was very aware of the flash when her eyes caught those of the woman in the dress that accentuated her every curve but hid her own timer as she walked toward her.

This, she thought, she _believed_ , had to be better than everything she had been through up until this point.

She was _desperate_.

* * *

 

When Rose leaned forward to kiss her, her heart felt like it froze.  The pool held no waves but those made by their feet as they dipped into it, as they brushed against one another, playing.  She didn’t let her heart keep her from continuing, didn’t hesitate as their lips touched, soft against each other.

When she pulled back, she knew.

The fireworks hid the light of the timer flashing through her dress, but it couldn’t hide the light of knowledge flickering through her bright blue eyes or the desperation with which she moved forward again, knocking their noses together, _wanting_.  Her heart still felt frozen in disbelief, the idea of romantic happily ever after not so distant after all if she could just make it through the plans with Emilio, if they could just find one another again after this was all over.  For once in her life, she could _hope_ again.

She had a soulmate.  An actual real live soulmate.  A beautiful, charming woman who she wasn’t related to whether by birth or by marriage.  She could hold on to this.

* * *

 

Luisa is Emilio’s daughter.

_Luisa is Emilio’s daughter._

Why had she dared to hope that this would be _easy_?


End file.
